Free Services That I Use

2016-05-23

I don’t want to share my research work, instead, I’ll give an introduction to how I organize my scientific life. So, it’s meta-research.

How to organize your scientific life? The simple answer is, by blog posting and note taking. I read LIU WeiPeng’s Dark Time years ago, there’s an article annalysing why you should start writing blogs right now. It’s convincing, so I began blog posting.

My blog is personal project, started last september, evolving all the time, now becomes an integrated blog posting system. The three main parts are github, travis-ci, and qiniu. They play different roles in the system and combined together provide me great convenience for tracking my ideas, developing my ideas, and sharing my ideas.

GitHub, offiers a code-hosting service. You can see my blog source code here, and my activities. I made most of the contributions in winter, that’s why there is a peak.

GitHub the website is easy to use, but I recommend you to use the command-line interface. Instead of the official GitHub for windows. After you know how to clone a repo, how to commit a change, and how to push your commits, you can have fun on GitHub.

Then you can write your blogs in markdown, and host all your staffs on GitHub.

The bcp utility is a tool for extracting subsets of Boost, it’s useful for Boost authors who want to distribute their library separately from Boost, and for Boost users who want to distribute a subset of Boost with their application.

Travis-ci is a build system. You should write a .travis.yml (dot travis dot yamal file), to configure how travis process your blog posts. if you know Linux, it’s straightforward and simple. It’s just several shell scripts. I use travis to convert my markdown file to html, then upload to qiniu.

Qiniu is a CDN, it offers 10 Gigabytes of storage for free. And also several command-line tools for file uploading.

When I commit some changes to my repo, travis will be notified (there’s a hook). It’ll build my website under my instructions and upload to qiniu, then you can visit it, at http://tangzx.qiniudn.com.

So, there are two hosting services: GitHub to store my sources files, Qiniu to store my website html files. And one temporary build system, Ubuntu, which helps me automate the conversion from markdown file to htmls.